Susan Benton:
Thank you very much. Good afternoon, everyone. My name is Susan Benton and I'm the Director of Strategic Initiatives for the Center for Digital Government. And welcome to our August teleconference call.
Let me give you a little background on what led to this call. As a national research and advisory organization, the Center has a unique ability to get a nationwide view of leading-edge technology projects and initiatives that cities and counties are moving forward. Earlier this year several of our member jurisdictions asked the Center for information about CRM and 311 call center projects occurring in other local governments. Those jurisdictions were either thinking about starting a CRM project or they were just at the beginning strategic planning stage.
The Center made a decision to launch a research project on CRM and 311, and we began asking those jurisdictions with CRM/3-1-1 projects to share their experience. As I talked with executives around the country, many pointed me to Chattanooga, Tennessee, to learn what that city had done because the word out was they had done a very, very good job.
I am going to turn the call over to David and Mark. And while they're talking, if you have questions, please write them down because following their discussion, as our operator said, we are going to open the lines for discussion.
David and Mark, thank you so much for joining us on today's call.
David Eichenthal:
Susan, thank you. This is a terrific opportunity for us. I found that every time -- I think Mark feels the same way -- every time we get an opportunity to talk about what we've been doing in Chattanooga with other folks around the country who are trying to do the same thing or have already done it, we actually wind up yes, giving people some helpful information but actually learning a lot as well. So we really appreciate the opportunity.
I'm going to talk a bit and then Mark Keil, who is our CIO and the father of Chattanooga 311-- and I'll talk about that as I go through the history of the project a little bit. Mark and I will be happy to answer questions later on.
A brief warning going into this and part of the reason that Mark and I are sort of tag-teaming on this is I am not a CIO. I am actually a lawyer by training and, as Susan mentioned, I'm also the city's finance director. And I think one of the good lessons and important lessons that we've learned out of the Chattanooga experience is the role that -- the extraordinary role that the CIO could play in getting this type of a program implemented but also the fact that while technology is critical to it, technology alone won't yield an excellent product. And I think we have achieved that here in Chattanooga.
311, this is an interesting phenomenon and an interesting experiment in progress that we're participating in Chattanooga. It is pretty interesting. I think that the last time I looked, you know, seven out of 10 of the largest cities in the country have 311. That is an interesting pace of growth if you compare 311 to 911.
311 really came on the scene, as it were, around 1996 when President Clinton talked about the idea of there being a non-emergency, three-digit police number and here we are, eight years later where lots of cities are talking about this, lots of cities are implementing it. And they're implementing it not just to deal with non-emergency police calls but to deal with a whole wide range of government services.
It is interesting earlier this year I was lucky enough to go to England where they are also looking at a three-digit number for non-emergency government services. But -- and if you think of that it's pretty extraordinary.
It took about eight years for 311 or at least the idea of 311 to go across the Atlantic, whereas it took about 30 years for 911 to make it to the United States after being implemented in the late 1930's as 999 in England.
So having said that about where 311 is with a little bit of a historical and a little bit of a national perspective, let me talk to you about how 311 came to Chattanooga, the implementation of it, and the results so far in this experiment in progress.
A bit of background about Chattanooga the city and city government. Chattanooga is actually Tennessee's fourth largest city. We have a population of about 155,000 people. The city is governed by a popularly elected mayor and a nine-member city council. It is not a city manager model, it is a strong mayor government.
Our general fund budget is approximately $145 million and we have about 2,500 city employees with the city being responsible for the delivery of most essential services, but not responsible for the operation of the city jail or for schools, which are now a county responsibility.
The story of 311 in Chattanooga begins in 2001 and it begins with the election of our current mayor, Bob Corker. Mayor Corker's background is actually significant to this story. He came to the office of mayor both as someone who had been a successful business person in the community and who had experience in government. He had actually served as the Finance and Administration Commissioner for the State of Tennessee for a number of year.
He came through a campaign where he did a fair amount of door-to-door campaigning in our city. He likes to talk about the fact that he knocked on about 9,000 doors in his election campaign. As he came into office he faced two problems or at least two challenges based on both what he saw when he came into office and what he had heard as he was out campaigning for mayor and knocking on all of those doors.
First was the problem of citizen access to government. There was a sense on the part of voters, on the part of residents who he was dealing with, that Chattanooga city government was difficult to reach, difficult to access even though it's a mid-sized city and a mid-sized city government. And folks, as is the case in many cities, did not know the one place to go for resolving problems. Residents were faced with, what I came to call blue pages roulette, where you are faced with literally dozens of different phone numbers for dozens of different city services in the blue pages. If you are a very sophisticated citizen, you may know which one is the right number to pick for what you may want. If you are not, you might randomly point your finger on the page and hope that the phone number you call will eventually get you to somebody who can help. So, there was that problem of citizen access to government.
The other problem that he confronted when he came into office was sort of a problem of accountability. He was a business person who delighted in the notion of looking on a regular basis at the bottom line of a profit and loss statement and knowing how well his business was performing. And while he was able to, and we had -- certainly had the technology in place to -- and reporting in place so that on a monthly basis you could know where the city was in terms of spending and where the city was in terms of revenue, you really couldn't know the bottom line in terms of actual performance of city services. There really was no good information out there about how many city departments were delivering the services that were essential to their mission. And that frustrated him a fair amount.
The story is told -- and it predates my being here -- the regular and right thing for a new mayor to do would be to regularly convene his administrators. But the problem was there was really no useful information which could become the focus of a dialog about departmental performance.
So fairly early on, and this is when Mark assumes the role of the George Washington of Chattanooga 311 -- the mayor became interested -- and came to embrace some of the notions around what Baltimore was doing both with 311 and with the Citistat-like system of performance measurement. Baltimore was not just using 311 as a single phone number to access city services but that one point of entry to city government to collect data and collect information about both what citizens were requesting in terms of services and through technology tracking each of those service requests to determine, again, how well, how effectively departments were performing.
There were, obviously, some critical questions at that very early stage. And I should say that this really creates my coming to Chattanooga. There were all sorts of questions around cost. This was in the 2001-2002 period, which everybody who is on the line who is a CIO or an employee of the city government will recall is probably one of the worst periods in terms of municipal government finance that we have seen. The economy was going south, local tax revenues were down, federal aid was going down, states were tightening up. There was not a great deal of financial resources around to go off and do a new project.
In Chattanooga shortly after coming into office the mayor actually had to increase property taxes and had to embark upon a program of reducing the city's workforce. So again, cost was a big issue in terms of being able to go forward with this sort of initiative.
There were all sorts of issues around staffing and structure. Staffing -- if you have this one call center, this 311 center, well who is going to answer the phones? Are we talking about hiring additional employees in this difficult fiscal situation? If we are not talking about new employees, are -- do we have problems in terms of just redeploying people who are in city government?
Structure, where does this all fit in? Where does 311 reside? Where -- and to the extent that 311 is mpt just a call center it's part of this larger process of accountability, where does that reside within a city government and how is that effective?
And then finally there's the whole issue of change management, right. I talked about the fact that in many cases we did not have data or information about how well departments were performing. Well the very fact that we would be shifting from that situation to a situation where we did have data, we did have accountability, had obvious implications for the people whose performance was suddenly being monitored.
Some very early decisions were made that actually went to some of these issues. First, unlike some of the 311 systems, a decision was that we would not be in the business at Chattanooga 311 of taking police or fire non-emergency call. And you will recall that this was sort of the initial intent around 311 -- that it was for those specifically policy non-emergency calls. Instead the model that Chattanooga pursued was one that focused on non-public-safety departments and their non-emergency calls. And as we'll talk about in a moment; that leads to a natural focus on a lot of public works, a lot of parks, and a lot of neighborhood service issues.
The second issue was the fact -- and it goes to the question of staffing and staffing level -- is the mayor made a very clear decision regarding IVR and the decision was no, that when people called the city -- the city of Chattanooga and they called 311 it would not go through a menu of automated responses. They would get a real person at the other end of the phone.
The third piece was well how do you bring this in? Is this something that our own IS could just do and design on their own? And again the decision was made no, we recognized we've got to bring somebody in to do this with us.
And then the fourth decision, and it is a decision that I think makes us a little bit different than some other 311 call centers and systems around the country -- was a decision that we're going to integrate the 311 and the performance management and performance review piece. And it's going to be housed in something other than the mayor's office, other than our Information Services Department.
So let me give you the timeline. February 2002 was an important period of time. It was just under a year of the mayor being in office. At that point, IS had done this extraordinary amount of due diligence helping the mayor think through the process and helping the mayor's staff think through the process and doing all sorts of good research on what other places who had gone before us had done in terms of both 311 and one-call centers.
So in February of 2002, we put out a RFP for the one-call center with the idea of bringing in that outside contract for service both in terms of software and consulting to get the 311 center going. At the same time, the city advertised for a position called performance audit manager.
In May of 2002, the mayor let the public in on the fact that this was a big priority for him and talked about 311 in his first State of the City Address.
July of 2002, I was appointed as the director of the city's first-ever office of performance review, with my very clear first mandate being getting 311 up and running. At which point, I come in as the partner to IS and to Mark Keil.
In August, our Information Services Division had already gone through this terrific RFP process, and I basically hit the ground running because the outside vendor that we ultimately used, Motorola, had already been identified and the contract awarded.
Between September and December of 2002, we go through a very intense process of both configuring the Motorola CSR system so that within our knowledge base everything that we need. We are designing the right questions that capture the processes of our departments and staffing out who will actually be in the 311 call center.
This was an extremely important part of this process both on the staffing issue and on the configuration issue. And the one thing that I'll say as I'm trying to go through this quickly so that I -- we have plenty of time for questions, the one thing that I'll say about the configuration process is that it made absolutely clear how important communication is, both communication between myself and IS which was, you know, daily if not hourly at some points in this process -- but extraordinary levels of communication between myself as project lead, IS, and the actual departments, right, can't forget about the departments in this process.
In January of 2003, we had our customer service representatives on board and they were being trained.
In February of 2003, we went through a gradual switchover and phase-in process. And by the end of February of 2003, we launched with both earned media and paid-for media telling people that they can now call one number for virtually all non-emergency services in the city -- in the City of Chattanooga.
So roughly one year after the RFP goes onto the street, we launch. I'll tell you a quick story which was is my first day that I got here I was interviewed by the local newspaper along with the mayor. And apparently someone told me the mayor the day before had been asked on talk radio how long it would take to implement this and he said he guess about six months. So when the local reporter asked me how long it would take I said, "Well, I guess about six months," to which the mayor responded, 'Are you sure?' I have been in government long enough to know that when the mayor says six months it is six months.
The one thing -- the one regret I think that Mark and folks in IS expressed was the fact that I happened to pick the shortest month possible that we had to have this completed in because we said we were going to complete by the end of February.
So what has happened, right? What's the impact of this bold experiment in progress been? Well, it has really redefined city government. Because we have access via the Web as well as by phone, we now have 24/7 access to requesting most city services.
Our call center is staffed from 8:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m. on weekdays. And right now we're up to seven staff and we're actually about to add an eighth staff person there.
We've ended this process of blue pages roulette. There is an extraordinary amount of awareness on the part of city residents that they now could get pretty much everything that they cannot go to 911 for -- they could go to 311 for it. I delight in getting letters of commendation.
One of our most effective means of advertising is putting on all of our city vehicles the 311 logo so that I now get and the customer service coordinator for the 311 center now gets frequent letters of commendation for the 311 staff who have gone out to clear up a storm water problem, or fill a pothole. In the minds of the public, 311 is Chattanooga city government now.
We handle about 15,000 calls per month. About half of those are people calling to request a service. About half of them are people asking what time the rec center closes or where the closest branch of the library is.
The top 10 services requests that we have are (Trash Flash), which is a garbage -- bulk garbage pick up system, missed garbage pick ups, litter, overgrowth, abandoned vehicles, and storm water problems. They actually -- those top 10 service requests or the top 10 service requests account for about 60 percent of our total.
Quarterly customer surveys, we go back and call people back who have called 311 -- indicate a very high level of satisfaction with how 311 staff handle problems and the levels of courtesy.
Now, with 311 -- and I'll try and do this in about the next six minutes so that we can wrap up for some questions and answers. What 311 also did was it began to provide a source of data by which we can regularly hold departments accountable and look at departmental performance. Remember, performance review is a critical part of the rationale for implementing 311 in Chattanooga.
We, as Susan mentioned, at some point in this process -- actually I think it was about a week before we launched 311 -- the mayor said, "Well, now that you've got that done can you be city finance officer also?" In February of 2003 I became the city finance officer and was able to turn our budget staff into a management and budget analysis staff. So we now had people who were very familiar with the city's finances and also able to begin to dig in what we were doing with the money.
311 and the CSR system began providing a steady flow of data by which we could take a look at questions related to performance. So that by summer of 2003 we went through an exercise where the MBA staff and department heads identified about a hundred major indicators citywide that we knew that we wanted to regularly track. And I should be clear, we weren't just looking at 311 indicators, but by and large we were looking at indicators where the data already existed, it just wasn't being looked at on a regular basis from a perspective of performance measurement or performance management.
In October of 2003, we launched Chattanooga Results, which is our version of Baltimore's City Stat, with monthly reports on most of the major departments, quarterly reports on some departments but also on some city-funded entities. For example, our regional transit agency goes through Chattanooga Results as well -- and meets with the mayor and senior staff to go over the results reporting.
The end of this story, I guess, is that there really is no end to this story, that this is a very dynamic process. We are always looking at changes within 311. We are always looking at potential for modification. We are always looking at whether the indicators we are counting are the ones that we should count to hold people accountable for.
But the result of the experiment in progress has been general levels of increasing satisfaction with city services. It has had an enormous impact on our budgetary process. The City of Chattanooga budget, this year, as we're emerging from a national recession, as we're still looking at somewhat flat tax revenues, did not include a tax increase, did not include layoffs and was just one percent more in actual dollars than what our fiscal 2002 budget had been.
And by the mayor's account, by my account, and by most administrators' account, it was actually the easiest budget process that we've had to go through in years, certainly in relatively lean times. The reason was that the issues that go to the balance between funding and delivery of services that are so critical to a budget-making process were no longer episodic in Chattanooga. They were no longer the thing you did around the budget. Those were issues that we were looking at at every one of these Chattanooga Results meetings that we were holding on a monthly basis. So that the solutions, the ways to come in with a balanced budget, were almost second nature by the time we had to get to the budgetary process.
Going back to what I said initially where cost was a key component of, how can we afford to do this - I think what we are finding in Chattanooga is that for a local governments our size, dealing with the balancing issues that we deal with and that most local government deal with, the question really is how can you do without it? How can you -- how can you not have this sort of process and performance measurement in place. Or else don't you risk making decisions that are intuitive as opposed to based on fact.
And the added benefit, right, from the perspective not of the CFO but from the citizen is it's much easier to get what you want out of city government now.
So that's our story today. Mark and I would be delighted to answer any questions.
And again, Susan, thank you. And, thank all of you for the opportunity to talk about what we're doing in Chattanooga.
Question and answer period
Susan Benton:
David, thank you for that wonderful overview. While we're waiting for some questions to come in, I have a question.
One of the things that you talked about when you started the project, it was a difficult time financially for all local governments. And I'm thinking about that as one of the barriers to governments moving forward on a project like you have done. It's very costly, it's very complex. But one of the other issues I see is fear. Fear of what's going to happen to my job. You described CRM as really transforming the City of Chattanooga. Could you talk about how departments and their staff were thinking about the 311 and CRM project?
David Eichenthal:
Well, let me try and answer that in two ways. I apologize. I said I was a lawyer so I'll try to answer both sides of every question. But there are two different issues, I think, that arise in terms of that fear of change. The most direct impact, right, is felt by the people who for their entire life may have had a job answering the phone at, you know, this subdivision within the division at public works, and taken the call and they were the one who was, you know, writing out the work order or typing it in and it going out. And suddenly we were telling them, no, no, no, you don't have to do that anymore. That's all going to come through this one call center. And there was fear there and I think that what we did to deal with that -- and I think we worked really hard with the administrators to deal with that -- was to recognize that it meant that they were going to be doing something differently but it didn't necessarily mean that they were not going to be working for the city of Chattanooga anymore.
And there were all of the fears that go around that but I can honestly say that no one lost their job as a result of 311 coming to Chattanooga.
Now I will tell you that we've reduced our workforce in Chattanooga. We had started that, I think I indicated, before we implemented 311 and that trend has continued. And I think sort of the consolidation of call management has had some impact on it but, obviously, we're not talking about a huge number there. But -- so there was that fear.
The greater fear and probably the more pervasive fear was, oh my gosh, the performance police are on the way. And, you know, I think that that's one of the issues that go to the point of communication that I tried to stress a little bit earlier. This was a very, very open process, not just open between IS and myself and Motorola, and not just bringing the administrators in, but really everybody within city government. I mean we held, I would guess, about a half dozen -- the only way to describe them were town hall meetings where you had administrators there but you also had administrative assistant there, you had some line people there -- there was a feeling that their life was going to change somehow because of 311 and ultimately Chattanooga Results being in place.
And part of it was just a willingness to stand around and answer the last question. Another part I think was attitudinal. I mean, you could envision -- and this has been the reason that some of the other performance measurement systems that came before Results has been called into question. You can envision a pretty adversarial process, particularly once you got to the stage of Chattanooga Results.
I think most department administrators and most other departmental officials who come to Chattanooga Results meetings will tell you that they are not adversarial. They become forums for identifying problems and solving problems.
And I tried to keep that framework in mind from the beginning. I mean, you know, I could have come in as this out-of-town guy and said, "Well, I'm here to clean everything up and fix the way first quarter works."
Mark Keil:
Out-of-town New Yorker.
David Eichenthal:
Out-of-town New Yorker, thank you, Mark. Actually, I was told that I was worse than a Yankee -- that I was a damn Yankee because the different between a Yankee and a damn Yankee is someone from the north who actually stays in the south is a damn Yankee.
But I was this out-of-town guy. I could have said, you know, I'm going to shake it all up. And instead what I said was, "We don't know. We -- you know, I don't have any reason to believe that our departments are performing poorly but I do know that without the information we could start to get from this process we'll never know if we could do better." And I think that helped.
I think the third piece that helped -- and then I'll be quiet for a moment -- is what we've proven through the Chattanooga Results process is that you could get things out of it. That solving problems doesn't always mean cutting budgets.
I'll give you a great example. After sitting through four or five meetings where I would hear about the level of fire inspectors in the Chattanooga Fire Department, and hear about, you know, they're being very productive but they're having an enormous amount to do and talking about all sorts of strategies to try and get other resources applied to doing fire inspection and fire safety and talking to the mayor about it, we actually said to the fire chief, "You know what, why don't you hire a new inspector?" There are only four inspectors, so a new inspector may not sound much but it's a 25-percent increase so it's a lot.
And I think by doing that sort of thing and by working through problems not just by saying, "Aha, you're messing up here, you're doing this wrong," but by saying, "Boy, this is a great job you're doing in this area. How could we do it at other places or how could we do more of it?" It goes to that attitude, that fear of change management.
Susan Benton:
Great, thank you. Questions?
[A participant from the city of Aurora]:
Hi, I have more of a technical question related to the opportunity to have other cities and counties in your area participate in this 311 system. Is that possible technically to have the 311 routed to different call centers or have you had any confusion with outlying areas of suburban Chattanooga for instance?
Mark Keil:
It is -- technically it's very capable of doing that. When we had looked at it with the prior mayor, at doing a region-wide 311 but money and budgetary it was -- it was looked at as not a profitable way to go about it. So we focused on doing it in a local area. We wrote an RFP so that we could expand it to the regions and bring on other cities because if you look at our region we are 10 miles away from the Georgia border where there are four or five cities -- we have one city that's an island inside the city limits, so a lot of -- lot of other entities that could participate in it, so as far as the software the technology is there.
As far as the switch and the 311 number we also approach it that way so at any point in time we could flip and serve 311 just like 911 does for the region.
[The participant from the city of Aurora]:
As a follow-up, in the 911 model some entities use a single 911 center and then route to multiple dispatch centers. Is that the model you'd employ when -- if other people were to come on or do you envision doing the dispatch or handling the call right there in that single center in Chattanooga?
Mark Keil:
That's probably not a technical issue as much as a political. Technically we could do it either way. The system we put in technically is a network-centric system which could have as many servers located in as many locations as you want running as one entity but spread through multiple states if you wanted to. So technically you could do that.
Politically is the reason of -- the same reason why it's a lot times politically for 911 being one entity or not one entity.
[A participant from Bexar County, Texas:]
Hi, thank you. Can you please repeat the number of 311 calls you receive per month and also tell us what percentage of requests were received via the Web?
David Eichenthal:
We get about -- we get -- up to about 15,000 calls per month.
The Web question, I think we're at about four percent of service requests coming in via the Web. If you have an hour or so Mark or I would be happy to chat with you about the need for lowering expectations, at least immediately, around the ability to get service requests and to get 311utilization through the Web.
I think we're at four percent. And the last time we checked, sort of did an informal survey of other 311's around the country, we were sort of leaders in terms of the ability to get people to use -- to use the Web for that purpose. In our advertising, we actually put a fair amount of effort into moving people to the city Web site. But there are a host of reasons why we haven't done better than four percent, some of which has to do with the size and nature of Chattanooga city government, some of which has to do with the current quality of our Web site, which we are in the process of totally revamping. And some of which has to do with demographics.
[A participant from the city of Tampa:]
Yes, David -- I assume your city departments had legacy systems in place that they managed their service delivery to the public. What problems did you encounter in trying to sell the 311 citywide management system to replace the ones that they had in place and were comfortable with?
Mark Keil:
We didn't -- there was not currently a 311 call-taking system in place. Some had work order systems and we did not replace any work order systems. What we did is iInformation Services created interfaces with the major work order systems. So when a call comes through 311 the data automatically resides also in their work order system. And when a work order system closes out it automatically closes it out in 311.
When a citizen calls -- the 311 call taker can sit there and respond with the status, give the person's name that's working on it, the phone number to call, or that it's been closed out and taken care of or when it will be taken care of.
We did not replace any system. We had a lot of departments that had no work order system and this was a boon to them because it brought -- without having to budget any money -- a work order system by using the 311 system.
[The participant from the city of Tampa:]
And approximately how many work order systems did you integrate into?
Mark Keil:
There were -- we integrated two systems in and we're on our third one integrating now, a new one that we just implemented.
David Eichenthal:
And just to follow up on that quickly, I mean, we are actually using the CSR software for non-citizen generated requests for services as well so that our building maintenance unit now, instead of people just calling up and saying, "Can you change a light bulb?" and that never being recorded, that type of stuff is now going through CSR and ...
Mark Keil:
Thank you, David. That reminds me. We did replace one system, one legacy. It was our legacy system. Our -- we had a helpdesk that we were pumping annual maintenance into and we weren't happy with. And I had already budgeted the replacement of it but held off pursuing that once we started the 311 project. And when we had 311 and became familiar with it we've now input 311 to be our helpdesk calls for Information Services.
[The participant from the city of Tampa:]
Great. And if I could ask one more follow-up question, one of the things I'm seeing is the politicians relish their communication that they have with the citizens. And when you come in and say we're going to do this through the call center now as opposed to have the citizenry call you direct and ask you to solve problems there's a little hesitation say on city council members or commissioners to support that politically because of the loss of their connection. Did you encounter that and how did you deal with it if you did?
David Eichenthal:
Actually, we were able to talk to our city council on this and basically the argument that we made to them was we were putting them in the good news business. They were no longer the ones having to work through the issue with the departments. They were no longer the person who their constituents had to call and complain.
And by the way, that sort of function of an elected official will never totally go away. But this was an easy way for them to not only refer on their -- a constituent's complaint or concern, but also have the capacity to go back and see what was happening to it. So that our council members now get I guess it's weekly reports on the status of all of the calls coming into 311 that are -- that are taking place in their district, at least those requesting service.
I'll tell you that, you know, two of our local council members have just asked, you know, is there a way for us to generate follow-up notes to some of the people who are calling 311 to make sure that they're getting what they need? And the answer is yes, and we're working on that with them right now.
So I think you're right. It is an issue, but it is one that you could talk through with people pretty easily if you think about it right.
One of the first places where 311 was implemented in the country was Chicago. I'm not going to say anything else. So the politics there are such that I don't think alderman in Chicago ever would have let this happen if they thought that they were somehow losing power or ability to serve their constituents and I don't think ours would have either.
[A participant from the city of Richmond:]
Good afternoon. How did you handle internal resistance to the project, the 311 initiative as well as Chattanooga Results?
David Eichenthal:
It's a great question and it's something that was implicit in my presentation but I'll make it explicit now.
This works a whole lot better if you have got strong executive leadership in support of the project, all right. This was very clearly the Mayor. The project was in the Mayor's State of the City, a separate new unit within the mayor's office was set up to make it happen, and when we held the first town hall meetings the kickoff speaker was the mayor.
And, you know, I would think it would be difficult, not impossible but difficult, to have accomplished this without strong mayoral support and leadership.
The other thing was I think that we're pretty lucky in Chattanooga that we have administrators who by and large wanted to know how they could do better. You know, when I came down -- when I came down to Chattanooga on my first interview, one of the round-robin interviews that I went through was a meeting with our public works administrator. And he was like, "I can't wait. I can't wait. I need more information so that I could better manage my department."
So it was a combination of having strong mayoral leadership, strong -- good administrators willing to adapt to change, and the third part really was communication -- there was no hidden ball trick going on here. That we were going to -- if folks have questions at any level -- we were going to answer those questions honestly. And we admitted that there were going to be problems. And we admitted that there were going to be changes in place. And our response was that we were going to work through them all because the end result was going to be better.
And, you know, I guess the thing is we backed it up, you know. We have never stopped communicating in this entire process.
[The participant from the city of Richmond:]
What departments or services are included in your 311 center?
David Eichenthal:
Finance and administration most of it -- public works is huge. Public works, you know -- I come from -- originally come from New York City and spent about a dozen years in New York City government. And our public works department here and I think public works departments in a lot of mid-sized cities do the equivalent of about 12 different departments in New York city government. So it is storm water, citywide services, it is building inspection. It's a host of infrastructure and waste related services.
We have a neighborhood services department that deals with more quality-of-life related complaints around housing conditions, around some litter and some overgrowth. Parks and recreation, you go down and make reservations for parks and recreation facilities by calling 311.
Pretty much I think the only pieces that are -- that are still out there a little bit are our treasury department and some parts of our inspection department. Everything else, if it's not police or fire, you could access through 311.
[The participant from the city of Richmond:]
That would include utilities as well?
David Eichenthal:
We don't have municipally owned utilities. We have our waste water, we have a sewer system that's part of public works but we have a separate electric utility, we have a private water utility, we have a private gas utility.
[The participant from the city of Richmond:]
And did you use new or existing staff for the 311 center?
David Eichenthal:
Thank you for asking that question. It's one of my favorite stories.
You know, the way that we were going to do this without it increasing staffing for city government was every one of the departments that were most impacted by this were going to give up a staff person who could go into the 311 call center. Now oddly enough, as much as I really do love working with these administrators, no one was particularly willing to give up their very, very best person to come and work in the 311 call center so that by and large I was being offered up the persons who administrator and division heads most wanted to see no longer working for them. And we didn't think that would work.
So the deal that I was able to cut -- and I was basically able to cut this again because the mayor said this is how we're going to do it was -- you don't have to give up your best person but if you're not going to give up your best person you've got to give up a vacant position. So I started collecting vacant positions.
And then the question was, well who are you going to hire for those vacant positions? And I made a judgment that some people, including some members of our city council thought it was the wrong one -- I decided that it was easier to teach people who were really good at service about Chattanooga city government than to teach people who might be really good at understanding Chattanooga city government about customer service. So that the majority of the people who are now in the 311 call center were people who before they had worked -- before they came here -- had never worked for city government before.
And the result has been I think very, very few cases where we mess up a service request. That is because of the quality of the configuration process, and the simplicity of the system, and the ability to go through the questions that lead you to where you need to go.
But we also have extremely high ratings when it comes to customer service representative courtesy.
[A participant from the city of Des Moines:]
Yes, could you tell me of the 15,000 calls you get per month what percentage of those are for information?
David Eichenthal:
It's roughly 50/50 and it varies. There have been points where it's about 60/40.
And, you know, the great thing is that as 311 gets ingrained in the community it becomes a place that you go and call -- by the way, not just for information about city services -- so that we can't take a service request if you're requesting a service from the county or from state government or from federal government. We have within our knowledge base and our customer service representatives are trained on the basics of certain county and state services as well.
Someone asked before about whether we deal with utility calls and the answer is no. But we actually have a protocol in place with the utilities under the assumption that somebody was going to call us and ask us an electric utility question-- and we needed to be in a position where we could get that person to the right place as opposed to just saying, "Gee, I don't know. We don't handle that."
In Chicago or Dallas, I was told that they get phone calls asking for movie times and another one frequently gets phone calls about traffic direction where people will call from the interstate and say I'm lost how do I get somewhere.
And the reality is we are not always able to deal with those sorts of calls because we don't want hold times to go up. But if we have the time we try and have the ability to help people in whatever way possible.
[The participant from the city of Des Moines:]OK. Could I ask just another quick question? How did you promote your Web channel?
David Eichenthal:
Unsuccessfully ultimately. But the -- we put the Web address on -- 311 is a button on the homepage of the Chattanooga.gov Web site and I now know there are 30 people going to Chattanooga.gov at their desk.
I talked about the signs that we have on city vehicles. We also do a lot of billboards. We had Chattanooga.gov on the billboard. When people are on hold, we have a message saying go to Chattanooga.gov. We had radio ads with the mayor and people talking encouraging people to go to Chattanooga.gov.
There are a couple of problems with the Web piece which I'll do as my final words in wrapping up. One, because we need a better Web site -- the information is actually more accessible by calling. Two, unlike US Air which you could -- or other airlines or other companies where you call a phone number and get a message saying you're number 487 in queue, we try and answer our calls pretty quickly so that there's not a real convenience saver for people to go to the Web.
And three, there have been some pretty good national studies that we've seen showing that there are just some things people don't want to do it on the Web, they want to talk to a live human being on the other end of the phone. Eventually we think lots of people are going to do it via the Web and when they do we'll be ready.
Susan Benton:
David, Mark, thank you so very much. This has been an excellent teleconference call today. I can't begin to tell you how much I've learned. And I'm sure that the people who are on the line and have been attending this electronic meeting feel exactly the same way as I do.
And thank you for participating on the CRM research project that the Center has been working on. The work that we are doing with Chattanooga, and Tampa, with Lee Hoffman, is part of a research project that will culminate in a strategic guide on CRM and 311. We expect the guide to be published and released this fall by the Center.
I want to thank all of the local government participants that have worked with us and I also want to thank Motorola and Avaya who have been our very good corporate sponsors on it.
David and Mark, thanks again, really appreciate you being with us today.
David Eichenthal:
Our pleasure, thank you.
Susan Benton:
Let me quickly mention our September teleconference. The focus of our September teleconference is wireless technology. We'll be sending out a notice to everyone. We'll also have the announcement posted on the Center's Web site so please visit us there.
Thank you -- everyone for participating today. If you have ideas for upcoming teleconferences, please be in touch with me. You can reach me at 202-537-6822. My email is sbenton@centerdigitalgov.com. I'm always interested to know how the teleconference has been helpful to you and to learn what topics you would like us to address in the future.
So thanks again to everyone.
